AMD's Zen 4 could be a behemoth with up to 128 cores in a single socket

AMD's Zen 4 is the next big revision of the company's Zen CPU micro-architecture and lately, information related to the upcoming platform has been spilling out fast. According to the latest rumor today, each next-gen EPYC server processor based on Zen 4 (codenamed 'Genoa') will pack up to 128 cores, which is double that of what AMD offers in its current EPYC 7003 lineup.

The image below shows the 64-core layout of an EPYC 7703 (Milan) processor:

The rumor isn't completely new as earlier there were reports of Zen 4 allegedly having more than 64 cores with new instructions like AVX-512, BFloat16, and more. These new instructions are helpful for high-performance computing (HPC) and server workloads so the alleged addition of them definitely makes sense.

Intel added AVX-512 instructions to its CPUs with the Rocket Lake architecture and the gains in compatible workloads are truly impressive. According to AnandTech, even an 8-core Rocket Lake-S part was able to win against a 64-core Zen 2 EPYC processor in 3D Particle Movement AVX-enabled benchmark.

While Zen 4 and Genoa are still a while away, it is already known that fourth-gen EPYC processors will be deployed inside an upcoming exascale supercomputer dubbed "El Capitan". El Capitan is expected to release in 2023 and it will be used for overlooking U.S. nuclear research and operations.

Source: Vegeta (Twitter) | Image via zhangzhonghao (Chiphell forum)